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Just a wee potboiler, this, but I recently picked up a paperback by Kim Newman entitled "The Quorum". This Newman fellow is something of an occult enthusiast and he has turned up on various shows on UK television over the years.
Essentially the novella is a variation on the themes of "Dr Faustus" with a contemporary spin, involving four media types who involve themselves with a Mr Derek Leech, who is clearly their mephistopholean svengali. Shades of Murdoch here, too!!!
Newman has a real knack for understanding the shallow manner of mainstream contemporary culture and the obsession with presentation and staying "on message", which he milks hilariously in this book, but the central core is about competitiveness, deception, and the thirst for glory at all costs.
The quorum angle is intersesting, as it hinges upon meetings between three of the four principal "sell-outs", with the the fourth suffering the consequences of their decisions/actions, as a form of human cypher. I will not even mention in detail "the device", only to say that it would be familiar to any readers of Thomas Pynchon's fascist psy-fi novel "Gravity's Rainbow".
Both books are as mad as a sack of livid snakes, but well worth a read for anyone interested in the mindset of our distant relations, the sociopaths.
Essentially the novella is a variation on the themes of "Dr Faustus" with a contemporary spin, involving four media types who involve themselves with a Mr Derek Leech, who is clearly their mephistopholean svengali. Shades of Murdoch here, too!!!
Newman has a real knack for understanding the shallow manner of mainstream contemporary culture and the obsession with presentation and staying "on message", which he milks hilariously in this book, but the central core is about competitiveness, deception, and the thirst for glory at all costs.
The quorum angle is intersesting, as it hinges upon meetings between three of the four principal "sell-outs", with the the fourth suffering the consequences of their decisions/actions, as a form of human cypher. I will not even mention in detail "the device", only to say that it would be familiar to any readers of Thomas Pynchon's fascist psy-fi novel "Gravity's Rainbow".
Both books are as mad as a sack of livid snakes, but well worth a read for anyone interested in the mindset of our distant relations, the sociopaths.